Sound & Sense: Chapter 12

·         Rhythm: any wavelike recurrence of motion or sound

·         Stressed Syllable: given more prominence in pronunciation than the rest

·         Rhetorical Stresses: used to make our intentions clear

      ex) “I don’t believe you” vs “I don’t believe YOU”

·         Poetic Line: unit that creates pauses in the flow of speech

·         End-Stopped Line: the end of the line corresponds with a natural speech pause (period, semicolon)

·         Run-On Line: the sense of the line moves on without pause into the next line (no punctuation at end)

·         Caesuras: pauses that occur within lines, either grammatical or rhetorical; varies the rhythm of lines

·         Free Verse: nonmetrical poetry in which the basic rhythmic unit is the line, and in which pauses, line breaks, and formal patterns develop organically from the requirements of the individual poem rather than from established poetic forms

·         Prose Poem: short composition having the intentions of poetry but written in prose rather than verse

·         Meter: the identifying characteristic of rhythmic language that we can tap our feet to (the pattern that sounds follow when a poet has arranged them into metrical verse); 3 basic units: foot, line, stanza

·         Foot: basic unit of meter that consists of one accented syllable and one or two unaccented syllables, or no unaccented syllables

·         Line: same as poetic line, but metric lines are measured by naming the number of feet in them (monometer, dimeter, trimeter, etc.)

·         Stanza: consists of a group of lines whose metrical pattern are repeated throughout the poem

·         Metrical Variations: call attention to some sounds because they depart from the basic metrical pattern

·         Substitution: replacing the regular foot with another one

·         Extrametrical Syllables: added at beginnings or endings of lines

·         Truncation: the omission of an unaccented syllable at either end of a line

·         Scansion: the process of measuring metical verse, that is, of marking accented and unaccented syllables, dividing the lines into feet, identifying the metrical pattern, and noting significant variations from that pattern

·         Expected Rhythm: the rhythmic expectation set up by the basic meter of a poem (silent drumbeat in your mind)

·         Heard Rhythm: the actual rhythm of a metrical poem as we hear it when it is read naturally; conforms to or modifies the expected rhythm

·         Grammatical Pause: a pause introduced into the reading of a line by a mark of punctuation (also known as caesura)

·         Rhetorical Pause: a natural pause, unmarked by punctuation, introduced into the reading of a line by its phrasing or syntax (also known as caesura)